Cost estimates for a key portion of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law have ballooned by $111 billion from last year’s budget, and a senior Republican lawmaker today demanded an explanation. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., wants to know by Monday why the estimated cost of helping millions of middle-class Americans buy health insurance has jumped by about 30 percent for an eight-year period, from 2014-2021. Administration officials say the explanation lies in budget technicalities and that there are no significant changes in the program that would raise concerns. Cost estimates for new government programs...

In yet another slight to rule of law, the Obama Administration has asked a federal court to put a press conference pronouncement above official regulation. Last week, the Department of Justice filed a legal response to one of numerous lawsuits currently challenging the constitutionality of the Obamacare anti-conscience mandate. The Administration submitted its response to the legal complaint of Belmont Abbey College, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, to the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. In what the Becket Fund is calling a “remarkable” stance, the Obama Administration argues that the court should dismiss Belmont...

Obama Cabinet Secretary: 'The Private Market is in a Death Spiral' By Fred Lucas February 29, 2012 (CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday that the days of private health insurance are coming to an end in the United States. “The private market is in a death spiral,” Sebelius said, contending this would be the case whether or not President Barack Obama's health care law had been enacted. At the Ways and Means hearing, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) asked Sebelius about the administration’s assurances that people who liked their...

Gee, who knew? Gallup says 72 percent of Americans think ObamaCare’s diktat that you must buy health insurance or pay a fine is unconstitutional. Perhaps more stunning is that 28 percent of Americans don’t think so...

The United States of America is becoming more like Nazi Germany every single day. In fact, the Nazification of America is almost complete. The parallels between Nazi Germany and the United States of today are going to absolutely shock many of you. Most Americans simply have never learned what life was really like back in Nazi Germany. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany was a Big Brother totalitarian police state that ruthlessly repressed freedom and individual liberty. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany adopted socialism, dramatically increased government spending and raised taxes to astronomical levels. Under Adolf Hitler, abortion became legal in Germany, the...

Testifying before Congress this morning, President Obama's acting budget director Jeffrey Zients directly undercut one of the administration's key legal defenses of its national health care law as it nears a hearing before the Supreme Court. In a hearing of the House Budget Committee Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., pressed Zients on whether the penalty that the health care law imposes on individuals who do not purchase health insurance constitutes a tax. Eventually, Zients said it did not. Snip Now the administration is making both arguments simultaneously. Before Congress, Zients is arguing that it is not a tax. But before the...

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 13, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Within weeks, the top lawyers in a dozen states may file a federal lawsuit against the Obama administration’s controversial requirement that all insurance plans include access to abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization, the attorney general of Nebraska told LifeSiteNews. Jon Bruning told LifeSiteNews.com that 12 states had signed onto a scathing critique of the mandate and were preparing to take more serious action. Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning On Friday, ten state attorneys general addressed a scathing letter to President Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis....

Medical insurance premiums in the United States are on the rise, the chief architect of President Barack ObamaÂ’s health care overhaul has told The Daily Caller.Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romneyâ€™s statewide health care reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms. In an email to The Daily Caller, Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Everybody's reporting that Obama's caving on this mandate that the Catholic services provide abortion and all. There's not a cave here! There may be an accommodation, but there's no big cave-in here. It's still the government mandating this stuff happen. They're just changing the provider. It's not done by the church. He says he gave them a way out of it by mandating the insurance companies do it, but that's not the point here. Great to have you. It's Friday. Let's go to! JOHNNY DONOVAN: Live from the Left Coast at our satellite studios in Los Angeles,...

The federal government’s new mandate — requiring Catholic charities, schools, universities and hospitals to supply employees with health insurance that covers birth control, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs — has become maybe the most controversial issue of our day. I’ve been inspired by the unified reaction from our Catholic community. The bishops of almost every diocese in the country have spoken out. So have our largest Catholic institutions. Many individual Catholics — of every political opinion — have united in opposition.

No Democratic president ever picked a fight with the Catholic Church in quite the way that Barack Obama has. One of the first things that Jimmy Carter did when he came into office was to scrap federal funding for abortions,... Even Bill Clinton – the “sex president” – supported some limits on partial birth abortion [snip] Yet Obama’s attempt to force Catholic employees to provide contraception coverage in employee healthcare plans has united the entire Church establishment – Left and Right – against him. And this is the establishment that garlanded him with honours three years ago at Notre Dame...

One of the most influential evangelical leaders in the United States says Christians should go to jail rather than comply with the Obama administration’s mandate to provide all contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs, in their health care plans. Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com “we will not comply” with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD. “We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just...

Romney will not distance himself from RomneyCare. Here's why: Romney wants to impose RomneyCare on all 50 states!! That is absolutely correct. He's already recruited Florida's Attorney General Pam Bondi as his healthcare czar to get it done. Romney claims that he wants to repeal ObamaCare, but he's already lined up Pam Bondi to head up his national healthcare task force to push RomneyCare on all 50 states. After all that has been said and written about socialized healthcare and individual mandates, Romney and Bondi, still LOVE RomneyCare and should he become president will attempt to impose it on ALL...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 requires employers to report the cost of employer-sponsored group health plan coverage on Forms W-2. The Internal Revenue Service (the "IRS") issued interim guidance regarding this informational reporting requirement in Notice 2011-28. In response to comments on Notice 2011-28, the IRS, on January 3, 2012, released an advance copy of Notice 2012-9, which supersedes Notice 2011-28. In general, Notice 2012-9 retains much of the original guidance set forth in Notice 2011-28, but with certain notable changes and additions, including the following: • Clarifies that the requirement to report the cost of...

A 23-year-old died of cervical cancer because doctors said she was too young for a smear test, her devastated family have claimed. Mercedes Curnow, from Cornwall, first went to her GP at 20 years old but her mother says her symptoms were 'ignored' because of her age. After a year of doctors visits, Ms Curnow was taken to A&E by a family member and diagnosed with cervical cancer in April 2010. But by then it was too late and, after 33 radiotherapy sessions and nine months of chemotherapy, she died at home in her mother's arms on December 14 last

Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.” I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). And the Boston Globe and Associated Press must be part of this vast right-wing conspiracy, because the Globe just ran an AP report exposing more problems in England. Here is an excerpt. When David Evans needed a hernia operation, the 69-year-old farmer became so alarmed by the long wait that he used an ultrasound machine for pregnant sheep on...

In the face of a growing controversy over whether two Supreme Court justices should disqualify themselves from the challenge to the 2010 health care overhaul law, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Saturday defended the court’s ethical standards. The chief justice’s comments came in his annual report on the state of the federal judiciary. In it, he made what amounted to a vigorous defense of Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan, who are facing calls to disqualify themselves from hearing the health care case, which will be argued over three days in late March. He did not, however, mention...

Those who have implied that the Presidentâ€™s health care law will establish â€śdeath panels,â€ť have encountered excessive criticism. Yet, more and more information is being released identifying that rationing of care will in fact occur, and that it will be done by government bureaucracies.For example, a phone call into The Mark Levin Show on WLS 890 from a Chicago neurosurgeon last month revealed that a Health and Human Services (HHS) document, associated with the Obama Administrationâ€™s federal health law, will inhibit patients over the age of 70 from receiving neurological care. Instead of receiving â€śadvanced neurosurgical care,â€ť â€śunits,â€ť (meaning patients),...

“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,” President Obama, September 12, 2008 Beginning January 1, 2013, ObamaCare imposes a 3.8% Medicare tax on unearned income of “high-income” taxpayers which could apply to proceeds from the sale of single family homes, townhouses, co-ops, condominiums, and even rental income, depending on your individual circumstances and any capital gains tax exclusions. Importantly, the “high income” thresholds are not...